I Hope You Like Reading About:

• the real Mr. Brooks
• the vengeful Ms. Andrews
• the personal remakes
• the future of photography
• finding your niche!

So take that, says the FAR and beloved contributor scb0212! Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods at gmail, post articles from the last week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!

At The Reveal, Scott Tobias talks about Albert Brooks the filmmaker via Albert the character in his debut feature Real Life:

Yet the fun of Real Life is how untenable reality is for the movies, particularly of the sort Albert actually wants to make. Reality can give you an “unsympathetic” lead character like Warren, despite the thousands of families that were winnowed down in the scientific casting process. Reality can take twists and turns that don’t fit the narrative you want to tell, like Jeannette suddenly developing feelings for Albert or Warren further tanking his image by accidentally euthanizing a horse in his veterinary practice. And, most of it, reality is straight-up boring, between the grind of day-to-day routines and the unique pressure of living under constant surveillance, which so dramatically alters the Yeagers’ behavior that one of the consultants quits and writes an article called “Nightmare in the Desert.”

Paste’s Matthew Jackson pays tribute to directors who have remade their own material:

But spiritual remakes aren’t just reserved for trying to make the same point twice. For proof, we can look to Raoul Walsh, who delivered the film noir classic High Sierra in 1941, then eight years later adapted the same story into a Western with Colorado Territory, proving that the same tale of a crook getting out of jail to pull one last job is beautifully done in two different genres. In the case of Howard Hawks, he didn’t even need the genre jump to do spiritual remakes, as he proved with Rio Bravo (1959), El Dorado(1966) and his final film, Rio Lobo (1970), all three of which are John Wayne-starring vehicles about small-town sheriffs facing outsized odds. The remakes are a case of diminishing returns, to be sure, but El Dorado in particular is a classic unto itself. Then, of course, there’s Sam Raimi, who delivered The Evil Dead, then gave us Evil Dead II, a film with roughly the same plot and the same main character, but with a more screwball tone. Both films stand today as horror classics.

Crooked Marquee’s Audrey Fox recounts the year Julie Andrews got her award vengeance on those who wronged her:

By the time the Academy Awards rolled around in April 1965, the idea that Julie Andrews was not famous enough to play Eliza Doolittle was laughable, so precipitously had her star risen. […] When Andrews accepted the Golden Globe for Mary Poppins, she couldn’t resist the temptation to get a little dig in at Jack Warner, who had balked at casting her in My Fair Lady. Most of her thank yous played out as one might expect, but at the very end, she dropped what is possibly the most genteel burn in awards speech history. “Finally, my thanks to a man who made a wonderful movie, and who made all this possible in the first place, Mr. Jack Warner,” she said with a wide grin.

At The Verge, Sarah Jeong writes some scary stuff about the coming ease of creating fake photographs:

Photography has been used in the service of deception for as long as it has existed. (Consider Victorian spirit photos, the infamous Loch Ness monster photograph, or Stalin’s photographic purges of IRL-purged comrades.) But it would be disingenuous to say that photographs have never been considered reliable evidence. Everyone who is reading this article in 2024 grew up in an era where a photograph was, by default, a representation of the truth. A staged scene with movie effects, a digital photo manipulation, or more recently, a deepfake — these were potential deceptions to take into account, but they were outliers in the realm of possibility. It took specialized knowledge and specialized tools to sabotage the intuitive trust in a photograph. Fake was the exception, not the rule. […] We briefly lived in an era in which the photograph was a shortcut to reality, to knowing things, to having a smoking gun. It was an extraordinarily useful tool for navigating the world around us. We are now leaping headfirst into a future in which reality is simply less knowable. The lost Library of Alexandria could have fit onto the microSD card in my Nintendo Switch, and yet the cutting edge of technology is a handheld telephone that spews lies as a fun little bonus feature.

Experimental Desert’s Adam Masroianni talks about the value of niches , biological and otherwise:

The globalization of attention is a damn shame for many reasons, and the biggest is that it leaves lots of local niches neglected. If everyone’s trying to be an Instagram relationship advice influencer, nobody’s trying to be their friendly neighborhood Breakup Whisperer. Plus, everybody, no matter how much of a nobody they are, has at least a few people who are counting on them, whose lives they can ruin or enrich, and it’s hard to do much enriching when you’re fretting full-time about who’s gonna be the next president. Local niches are important because they can pack a lot of meaning into a tiny space; they make it so that more people can matter. When I was thirteen, I got promoted to moderator of the “Flaming Chickens” forum of a Yu-Gi-Oh! message board, which is where people were allowed to “flame” things that they hated (stepdads, math class, low-quality English dubs of Yu-Gi-Oh! episodes). I was so excited because it meant I meant something. Was the job pointless? Yes. Was it not a “job” at all in the sense that it paid nothing? Yes. Did the forum eventually die because of an infidelity scandal inside the polycule of people who ran the message board? Also yes. But for a bit, I fit.